His concluding chapter shows him to be the poet he (sometimes) is. And why is this at all important? Because, as no less a literary luminary than François Mauriac once said, "I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet."

Why, then, only four stars? Because Kevin's novel is a tad too cerebral. And while I have nothing against 'cerebral,' a lot of it is hard to follow while riding to and from work on a subway train.

That said, if you can find a quiet spot in your garden somewhere far from 'the madding crowd,' I heartily recommend this novel. It is literature in the purest and best sense.

I am, giving this 5 stars because, It was a book that all of "us" in our ordinary sweet, unwounded banality of lives, who send our young men and young women to war should read. I don't know if this was a "true" story of events unfolding, but it certainly was a story full of emotion. Reading or watching CNN during the 1st days of the war in Iraq, I remember being totally glued to the TV hoping and with dread, to maybe get a glimpse of my nephew who was deployed there. Hearing the numbers of our fallen soldiers, reminding myself that I would hear 1st before Nancy Grace, if it was my loved one listed as the fallen soldier of the day at the end of her show. Thanking God everyday, that my nephew was spared. Yellow Birds and Kevin Powers, Bart, Murph and Sterling will be embedded in me for a long time! ( )

Man I really wanted to like this, but I didn't. Maybe it's because I like Tim O'Brien so much and was expecting this to be like that, maybe because I was reading it during a stressful time of year for school, maybe because so much of what being in a war is like now sounds cliched. Who knows. It's like the author and I spoke very different languages, and I found his language to be boring and unrelatable. ( )

Man I really wanted to like this, but I didn't. Maybe it's because I like Tim O'Brien so much and was expecting this to be like that, maybe because I was reading it during a stressful time of year for school, maybe because so much of what being in a war is like now sounds cliched. Who knows. It's like the author and I spoke very different languages, and I found his language to be boring and unrelatable. ( )

Man I really wanted to like this, but I didn't. Maybe it's because I like Tim O'Brien so much and was expecting this to be like that, maybe because I was reading it during a stressful time of year for school, maybe because so much of what being in a war is like now sounds cliched. Who knows. It's like the author and I spoke very different languages, and I found his language to be boring and unrelatable. ( )

The novel moves, fitfully, through Virginia and Iraq and Germany and New Jersey and Kentucky, from 2003 to 2009. Recalling the war, Bartle says, is “like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion.” This serves the story in two ways. First, it turns readers into active participants, enlisting them in a sense as co-authors who fit together the many memories and guess at what terrible secret lies in wait, the truth behind Murphy’s death. Because they lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable.

Then too, the fractured structure replicates the book’s themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands — the nonlinear design of Powers’s novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesn’t just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards.

...and while few will have expected the war in Iraq to bring forth a novel that can stand beside All Quiet on the Western Front or The Red Badge of Courage, The Yellow Birds does just that, for our time, as those books did for theirs.

A yellow bird With a yellow bill Was perched upon My windowsill I lured him in With a piece of bread And then I smashed His fucking head.. ----- Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence ------

To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and eveil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. ----- Sir Thomas Browne

Dedication

For my wife

Στη γυναίκα μου

First words

The war tried to kill us in the spring.

Quotations

If you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man.

It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said, it wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.

Last words

And I saw his body finally break apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the shadows of the date palms fell in long, dark curtains on his bones, now scattered, and swept them out to sea, toward a line of waves that break forever as he enters them.

Amazon Best Books of the Month, Debut Spotlight, September 2012: With The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers introduces himself as a writer of prodigious talent and ambition. The novel opens in 2004, when two soldiers, 21-year-old Bartle and the teenaged Murphy, meet in boot camp on the eve of their deployment to Iraq. Bartle, bound by a promise to Murphy's mother to guide him home safely, takes the young private under his wing as they move through the bloody conflict that "rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer." Powers, an Iraq veteran, eyes the casual violence of war with a poet's precision but without romanticism, moving confidently between scenes of blunt atrocity and almost hallucinatory detachment with Hemingway-like economy and prose that shimmers like desert heat. Compact and emotionally intense, The Yellow Birds joins a maturing and impressive collection of Iraq War literature--both memoir and fiction--that includes Brian Castner's The Long Walk and Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. --Jon Foro

In the midst of a bloody battle in the Iraq War, two soldiers, bound together since basic training, do everything to protect each other from both outside enemies and the internal struggles that come from constant danger.